For professional carers, looking after the most vulnerable members of society requires a strong positive outlook especially when dealing with challenging behaviour. But that outlook is much easier to achieve and maintain if carers feel workplace environments are supportive and understanding of the pressures they face in their efforts to deliver great care.
Culture for care: your toolkit, recently launched by Minister for Care and Support Norman Lamb at Skills for Care’s national conference in Birmingham, is for all social care and support employers, regardless of size or services delivered. It has been developed to be as relevant to individual employers who employ their own personal assistants as it is to a large employer with many staff.
The toolkit will help employers across our sector create workplace cultures in which everyone is valued, included and respected.
It uses real life scenarios from employers, and key messages from other national bodies, for employers to use with their staff and to help put in place the foundations for a positive workplace culture.
As well as employers those who commission, monitor and support and advise services must also play their part. Everyone in the sector must work together to change negative workplace cultures that can result in poor quality care and instead build supportive places in which to work and live.
Creating positive workplace cultures is especially vital in adult social care, where we routinely offer care and support to some of the most vulnerable people in our communities who often have complex needs.
The principles of positive workplace cultures also dovetail nicely with other major Skills for Care initiatives such as the Social Care Commitment. You can read Norman Lamb’s wholehearted endorsement of this ‘contract’ between social care employers and employees here.
1 comment
Comment by Termite posted on
Wy should GP's refer patients to the mental health system ... once you reach that you have no hope! You just join the conveyor belt that goes around and around!
Mental health care needs a revolution, psychiatrists decide when they want to see patients, that is the wrong way around, it is the patient that should decide when the need to see a psychiatrist in the same way they decide when they need to see a GP.
Who labelled mental health patients 'service users'; it is so derogatory, yet we have no say in it! It is stigmatising folk who have enough problems as it is.
We have heard of so many new ideas, new system etc. but they are five minute wonders, with everything changed in the next ten minutes. What mental health patients really need is for staff on wards to have time to talk to patients, no congregate in the office filling in bits of paper. It is HCA that provide most care fro in patients.
On a ward, the doors are locked, on a nice sunny day when you desperately want to sit outside, you cannot do do because they are short staffed. Life is lived by the clock, every minute of the day has a set task, we are offered child like games to play, if you can't sleep, you are not allowed out of bed. The only food allowed is what is provided by the hospital, 'cook chilled' slop, we are not allowed to keep snacks in our lockers.
If you are hungry, tough luck!
Tea is made with water from a 'pump pot' that is luke warm, just in case we burn ourselves .. but still expected to be grateful fro this stuff!
Jacket potatoes fro lunch, you can beans or butter, but not both ... and we call this excellent care!
Being in a mental health ward is worse than being in prison!
My GP provides me with fantastic support, as busy as he is, he makes time to talk, I can go any time without an appointment and eh will 'fit me in, that is what I call care and support!
In the 50's / 60's, if you remove all the horrible treatments, mental health care was better back then than it is today!
How sad it is that anyone should feel that way!